Against a background of deepening care marketization and professionalization of care in China’s nursing home sector, and in meeting rapidly growing care demands of an aging population, Direct Care Workers (DCWs) are tasked to provide quality care through often-devalued work. Though nursing home development in China is well documented, little research attention has been directed to the incongruence between DCWs’ committed care and their being largely unrecognized in that care. Using ethnographic data collected at one government-sponsored nursing home in urban central China, this chapter examines how this incongruence is made possible, and does so through the theoretical lens of boundary work, underlining the process of boundary construction and contestation in DCWs’ interaction with older adults, family members, and administrators within the context of care marketization. Three themes related to boundaries emerged: navigating between dirty and clean, balancing between caring and professional, and reconciling between desirable and unwanted. These interlocking themes suggest the often-paradoxical nature of institutional care work and its tendency to devalue and marginalize DCWs by revealing both the nonreciprocal nature and the othering-effect of the work of DCWs under investigation. This chapter offers a nuanced understanding of mundane care work and unveils emerging features of service work in a post-socialist society.